Inventing Reality

by Michael Parenti

  The structures of control within the US media are different from the institutionalized formal censorship we might expect of a government-controlled press; they are less visible and more subtle, not monolithic yet hierarchical, transmitted to the many by those who work for the few, essentially undemocratic and narrow in perspective, tied to the rich and powerful but not totally immune to the pressures of an agitated public, propagandistic yet sometimes providing hard information that is intentionally or unintentionally revealing.

  The US news media operate under an established ideology that claims they have no established ideology, no racial, gender, or class bias. Supposedly committed to no persuasion, they just report things as they see them. Now and then we hear murmurs to the contrary. For instance, for nearly two decades, every evening in the week, the dean of America’s newscasters, Walter Cronkite, would end his CBS television news show with the statement: “And that’s the way it is.” On the eve of his retirement in 1980, Cronkite admitted that isn’t the way it is. “My lips have been kind of buttoned for almost twenty years... . CBS News doesn’t really believe in commentary,” he charged.2

  It was a remarkable admission. The man who had been given honorary degrees by leading universities and who had been voted in one opinion poll the nation’s most trusted public figure was saying that he had spent almost two decades under the censorship of network bosses. To be sure, it was a comfortable sort of repression. Cronkite’s last ten-year contract with CBS went for $20 million, a sum that has been known to ease the pain of buttoned lips. But finally Walter Cronkite had his moment of truth. Yet he only complained, and never explained: Why was he so restricted by those who exercised such power over him?

  That we think the American press is a free and independent institution may only be a measure of our successful habituation to a subtler, more familiar form of suppression. The worst forms of tyranny—or certainly the most successful ones—are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness and the fabric of our lives as not to be perceived as tyranny.

  This is not to say the press has escaped all criticism; indeed, more frequently than ever, the media are under attack from various quarters. Most widely publicized by the press itself are the right-wing attacks on the news industry for its supposedly liberal biases and negative treatment of American life, its failure to support true American values and even its “un-Americanism,” its alleged softness on communism and eagerness to give publicity to protesters, its failure to show business’s side of things, and its occasional stories about wasteful defense contracts, corporate crime, and the crimes of conservative leaders (for example, Watergate and the Iran-contra affair). Conservatives would prefer that the news media avoid any mention of the large profits that big business makes (especially embarrassing during hard times). They would like never to see reports about unemployment or the struggles of minorities, women, and the poor, or about those who protest against US military interventions, arms spending, nuclear power, and corporate mistreatment of the environment.3

  In fact, critical information and commentary in the mainstream media treat but the tip of the iceberg. But even this is more than conservatives care to endure. They would prefer a press dedicated to an exclusively unblemished picture of American business and American life, complete with upbeat stories about the nation’s military prowess, its benign world leadership, and the ever-expanding blessings of the free market at home and abroad.

  Attacks from the right help the media maintain an appearance of neutrality and objectivity. The charge made by leftist critics that the media are complicit with the dominant powers seems to be refuted when these same powerful interests attack the media for being a liberal tool. The truth is that while the press may not be totally uncritical or adulatory toward big business and the executive power of government, it is not an autonomous adversary, independent of the corporate class. On the contrary, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is owned and largely controlled by that class.

  Not all the criticism is from conservatives. Centrists and liberals, including some journalists, have criticized the press for failing to do its job of informing the American public about the crucial issues. Criticism from those on the political center focuses less on content than on the lack of it. They complain that the news is superficial and trivial, that it focuses on personalities rather than issues, on surface happenings rather than substantive matters, that it is often more interested in entertaining than informing us.

  I agree with such observations and in the pages ahead will offer supporting examples. But the kind of criticism remains more of a complaint than an analysis. When the centrist and liberal critics get around to trying to explain why stories are so poorly reported they are likely to blame the journalists.'They tell how stories are mishandled because reporters are not well informed, too dependent on officialdom, or given to indulging their “personal predilections and prejudices.” 4

  These kinds of criticisms are often true, but they place too much blame on the weakest, lowliest link in the news manufacturing chain: the reporter. The critics say nothing about the editors who cut and rewrite the reporters’ copy and who control their jobs. They say nothing about the people who hire, fire, pay, and promote the editors and who exercise ultimate control over them. The centrist-liberal critique fails to note that while the journalist’s product may be gravely wanting in certain qualities, including objectivity and balance, it remains acceptable to his or her superiors. It is the kind of copy they deem suitable for their readers. And as will be seen, the reporter who produces more penetrating stories—especially ones that reveal something about the exploitative, undemocratic nature of corporate America and US foreign policy—will run into difficulties with superiors. By fingering the journalist as the main or only culprit, liberal critics are treating reporters as free agents when in fact they are not. The “working press” works for someone other than itself.

  Sometimes media critics will fault not the people involved in manufacturing the news but the structure of the media. By its very nature, we are told, television emphasizes the visual over the ideational. Action events and national leaders have visual appeal; issues and policy analysis do not. Hence there is bound to be more surface than substance in the news. The problem also is said to exist—to a lesser extent—with the print media, which have limited space and time to frame vastly complex events on a daily basis. So, it is said, the media latch on to simple images and explanations in order to reduce their subject matter to manageable components.

  There is no denying that stereotyping and reductionism are the common tools of shallow thinking, but why must such shallowness be treated as inevitable? That the media so frequently resort to slick surface treatment does not mean such treatment is the only way the media can function. Rather than being a criticism, this “blaming the nature of the media” is a disguised defense. It gets everyone off the hook and treats television, or whatever medium, as a disembodied technological force all its own. However, it is not television as such that chooses to cling to surface events but the people who run it. With the right script and right intentions, visual media can offer engrossingly informative and penetrating presentations on vital subjects, as demonstrated by the many fine independently produced documentaries the major networks deign not to carry.

  In contrast to the above views, I argue that the news media do not fail to do their job, rather they perform their function all too well. Their objective is not to produce an alert, critical, and informed citizenry but the kind of people who will accept an opinion universe dominated by corporate and governmental elites, almost all of whom share the same ideological perspective about political and economic reality. True, these elites do not always appreciate how well they are served by a press that would be less effective if it were exclusively a propaganda arm of business and government, but this does not mean the press is free and independent.

  The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors,
for they are not random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporatism over anti-corporatism, the affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over disarmament, national chauvinism over internationalism, US dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist nationalist change. The press does many things and serves many functions, but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power. That is what I will try to demonstrate in this book.

  These basic biases are rarely subjected to careful scrutiny in the corporate-owned media. When the press does give attention to media critics, they are almost always of the conservative variety. Progressive criticisms are habitually ignored or—when aired on rare occasions— they are greeted with amused incredulity by conservative and centrist commentators. This itself demonstrates something about the media’s conservative slant.5 Its willingness to give a respectful hearing and serious response to right-wing attacks along with its tendency to ignore leftist criticism testifies to its ideological bias and reflects the distribution of class power within the media’s own structure.

  CLASS, RACE, AND GENDER

  One indication of how the press serves the privileged and the powerful is found in how it treats the underprivileged and the powerless. The news media are largely an affluent White male domain. Blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, and the poor are accorded brief mention on special occasions. The poor are most likely to receive coverage during Thanksgiving and Christmastime when some indigents are administered turkey dinners, the message being that there is comfort, food, and shelter even for the more unfortunate among us. When more serious coverage of poverty in America is forthcoming (for instance the ABC evening news reports of June 18—19, 1991), the media still have nothing to say about why some 35 million people live below the poverty level in what is professedly the richest country in the world. The poor are with us, we are told, but there is no exploration of the link between poverty and the increasing concentration of wealth, between poverty and regressive taxes, high rents, low wages, high profits, inflated prices, and underemployment.

  The class dimensions of poverty are judged to be simply not a fit subject for the mainstream news media. One’s social status is seen principally as a matter of individual achievement. Class as a designation of occupation, income, and life-style wins occasional recognition with such references as “middle class,” “low income,” “professional class,” “white collar,” and “blue collar.” But class, as an exploitative relationship between owners and employees, as a determinant of wealth and power, is a subject the news media rarely if ever touch upon.

  The news media treat slums as more or less the natural habitat of the people who live in them, rather than the creation of real estate speculators, fast-buck developers, urban “removalists,” unenforced housing codes, tax-evading investors, and rent-gouging landlords. The press may sometimes link disorders among the urban poor to the conditions of inner-city life, but no linkage is made between such obviously bad conditions and the economic injustices of the system that produced them.

  While the press reports occasional abuses in the economic system, it treats corporate capitalism as providential rather than exploitative. The contradictions of capitalism, for instance, between the need to keep wages down in order to maximize profits and the need to keep wages up in order to maintain demand, are seldom if ever dwelt upon in the media. The waste, duplication, stagnation, unemployment, inflation, and anarchy of production that come with an unplanned economy, and the failure of a market economy to respond to social need rather than private greed, are seldom linked to anything in the nature of capitalism. Recessions are treated as natural, albeit unfortunate, events, somewhat akin to earthquakes or droughts, caused by something innocent called “hard times.” Inflation and pollution are supposedly caused by everyone, since we all spend and consume. One television reporter put it this way: “Inflation is the culprit and in inflation everyone is guilty.”6

  Class biases operate in how crimes are reported and in what is even defined as a crime. Press coverage focuses on crime in the streets, downplaying such corporate crimes as monopolistic restraints of trade, illegal uses of public funds by private interests, occupational safety violations, unsafe consumer goods, and environmental poisonings— which are, or should be, crimes, and which can cost the public dearly in money and lives.7 Every year more than 14,000 workers in the United States are killed on the |ob; another 100,000 die prematurely, and 400,000 become seriously ill from work-related diseases. Many, if not most, of these deaths and injuries occur because greater consideration is given by management to profits and production than to occupational safety and environmental standards. Yet these crimes are rarely defined and reported as crimes by the news media.

  How the press defines and reports on crime is largely determined by the class and racial background of the victim and victimizer. Affluent victims are more likely to receive press attention than poor ones, leaving the false impression that most victims of crime are from upper- and middle-class backgrounds. And low-income lawbreakers, especially Blacks, Latinos, and other minorities, are more likely to be depicted as criminals than the corporate leaders whose crimes may be even more serious and of wider scope and repercussion than the street criminal’s.8

  The news media have not much to say about the struggles of African-Americans, Latinos, and other ethnic groups for jobs, decent housing, safe neighborhoods, viable political organizations, and the like. Likewise, the struggles of people of color to gain recognition in art, literature, entertainment, music, sports, religion, labor, and education have earned relatively scant notice in the White media.9

  The African-American candidate who attracts millions of votes in presidential primaries while taking a progressive stance on issues is likely to win unsympathetic press treatment, as did Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. Jackson was designated the “Black candidate,” one with limited appeal to White voters, even though he did well in primaries in predominantly White states like Vermont and Oregon. Despite his constant attention to the issues, he was said to be on a self-serving ego trip. Although his financial status was much more modest than that of most other presidential candidates (and all television anchor persons), the press raised questions about his “large” salary. And because he argued that US interventions abroad serve neither the interests of the people of those regions nor those of the American people, he was labeled a “Third World radical.”

  The mayor of Gary, Indiana, Richard Hatcher, commented on the hostile and distorted coverage accorded him by the press in his city. “I was the first Black mayor of this city and they’ve never quite forgiven me for that.”10 After he had been reelected for a fifth term with 90 percent of the vote, the Post-Tribune still saw fit to remark that there was “no consensus” among the voters in support of Hatcher. And when a University of Chicago study rated Gary first among sixty-two cities in regard to fiscal policy, the local media never even reported it.11

  African-Americans are generously overrepresented in the media when there is bad news to report. Thus, polling statistics in USA Today show that only 15 percent of US drug users are African-American, but data from the Black Entertainment Network indicate that 50 percent of network news stories on drugs focus on African-Americans.12

  As media commentators, African-Americans remain drastically underrepresented. Mayor Hatcher noted: “About the only time you really see Blacks giving their opinions, or given any serious space, is when it relates to minorities or civil rights. That seems to be the only time the media feel we are competent enough to express opinions.”13 Even in that area, Blacks who express ideas on race that run counter to the predominant ideological mode are likely to be subjected to attack. Reputable African-American scholars and educators have
tried to move away from a Eurocentric approach to history and set the record straight with university curricula that treat the often neglected African and African-American experience. But these efforts have been vehemently denounced by the White media as “bad history” and “ethnic cheerleading.”14

  In contrast, conservative African-American writers and academics who serve as cheerleaders for the status quo are accorded generous exposure as they denounce affirmative action and other federal programs designed to help ethnic minorities, and as they praise the established power structure and downplay the effects of racism in the United States.15 Thus the major media give frequent and eager attention to Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, along with less frequent exposure to establishment liberals like Juan Williams and Roger Wilkins—who seldom if ever shake the ideological boat. But almost never do we find major media exposure given to African-American left critics such as Angela Davis, Charlene Mitchell, and Ron Daniels. Blacks can appear on national television, but they must be the right kind of Blacks.

  African-Americans and other people of color are drastically underrepresented as employees in the communication industry. As of 1990, all minority groups taken together composed only 7.8 percent of newsroom employees. More than half of the 1,700 daily newspapers in the United States have no people of color working on their journalistic staffs.16 Of employed African-American journalists, many work for Black-owned publications and radio stations.

  Women are another drastically underrepresented employee group in the communication industry. They hold only 6 percent of the top jobs and 25 percent of the middle-level management positions in news organizations. Female correspondents increased from about 10 percent to 15.8 percent between 1975 and 1989. But of the fifty correspondents seen most frequently on the three network evening newscasts in 1989 only six were women.17 One study found that only 10.3 percent of the guests on “Nightline,” the ABC late-night news show, were female, and of the twenty most frequent guests, none was a woman.18